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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
The central question:
What is the underlying nature of Evil?
Does it have a deep reality?
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Many tend to think of Evil as a substantive force in the world; that it possesses a deep reality, as real as God, and in opposition to him.
"If we could just isolate and locate Evil," many believe, "we could surgically remove it, stamp it out, and be rid of it."
Our popular culture bears testimony to this perceived grand cosmic struggle between Good and Evil:
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Don Feder: "The Lord of The Rings (books and movies), and especially The Return of the King, is about the struggle of good and evil – a dark lord of supernatural malevolence intent on crushing free will and enslaving humanity, a ring of power which corrupts those who possess it and therefore must be destroyed, courageous warriors, a wise and benevolent wizard, and ordinary folk who – through their sacrifices – rise to heroic heights.
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Dick Morris, March 13, 2002: "In Europe, it's not cool to get hot and bothered about [9-11]. It violates the cafe-sophistication which insists, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, on seeing a world with all shades of gray, rather than one polarized by good and evil. Ennui is in. Energetic, righteous indignation is for the immature. You know, like Americans."
John Stewart, Justice League: "In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might, beware my power, Green Lantern's Light!"
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President Ronald Reagan, speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 8, 1983: "Let us beware that while they [Soviet rulers] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination over all the peoples of the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.... I urge you to beware the temptation ... to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of any evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil."
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Douglas MacArthur: "Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."
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Garrison Keillor: “The term 'evil powers' is one you hear only in the church, or in Marvel comic books or [political] speeches.”
But many of history's philosophers, saints, and thinkers had a different view:
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Augustine, The Confessions: "From whence is evil? ... as yet I knew not that evil was nothing but a privation of good, until at last a thing ceases altogether to be … it [is] not any substance ... but the perversion of the will, turned aside from Thee, O God."
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Richard Ellmann: "[Wilde] was proposing that good and evil are not what they seem, that moral tags cannot cope with the complexity of behaviour."
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John Warwick Montgomery: "One of the biggest difficulties in our contemporary society is that we try to locate the evil in somebody else and then we try to get rid of him. The police are pigs or the students are worthless, and so on and so on. The Marxists are the devils or the Republicans are the devils or you name it. We try to isolate the evil and then get rid of it."
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Edward C. Randall, the Buffalo attorney who, for 22 years, worked with psychic-medium Emily French and received thousands of direct-voice communications from the Spirit World. One message spoke of the nature of Evil:
"[Our teachers reveal] the sublime truth that Evil is not a ... positive principle, but a negative condition [that is, an absence of something], a mere [perception and] temporary circumstance of existence."
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C.S. Lewis: "Badness is only spoiled goodness."
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Thomas Aquinas: "Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good."
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John Steinbeck, East of Eden: "In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love."
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Carl Jung, The Psychology of the Unconscious, 1943: Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Augustine: There is no possible source of evil except good.
Mohandas Gandhi: Evil is good or truth misplaced.
Dust Devil, the movie (1992): “There is no good or evil, only spirit and matter; only movement toward the light, and away from it.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “Evil is only good perverted.”
John Henry Newman: “Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.”
Eva Broch Pierrakos: "You conceive of two opposite forces: a constructive one opposed to a destructive one: good opposed to evil ... evil, is not a final separate force... No matter how ugly some of those manifestations are ... you [must] realize that every one of these [bad] traits is an energy current, originally good and beautiful and life-affirming."
Austin O’Malley: “An evil thought in a soul is like a water-rat swimming in a pond at evening: the rat destroys the iridescent reflection of heaven in the water.”
John 1:5: “The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness could not put it out” (The Message translation). Commentators point out that the flame of a single candle begins to defeat darkness, and increasingly so with each incremental addition of candlepower. But darkness has no such corresponding power over light. Light is something substantive; darkness is merely the absence of light. Darkness must begin to flee before the smallest encroachment of light, the tiniest candle, but darkness has not the least such power over light.
The Small Ego believes that "the other guy" is the problem; that, if we could just get rid of the trouble makers in the world, life would be good; that the whole of existence is to be cast as a struggle between "us and them," the good guys and the ones who wear black hats.
But thinkers such as Longfellow, Ghandi, the apostle John, and others disagree.
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Evil is simply a distorted image of the Good. Evil has no substance of its own - it's merely Good turned on its head. We have natural needs, desires, cravings, all of them good, of and by themselves. But it all goes wrong when we try to fill those holes in our hearts by untoward means. And this is what Evil is - a faulty perception of the Good, which causes people to make bad choices, as they attempt to snatch at short-cuts to the Good.
The Small Ego is not impressed with this definition: "But wasn't the Soviet Union evil? aren't mass murderers evil? aren't the Hitlers of the world evil? Wouldn't we be better off if we just got rid of them?"
All things that would cause us harm should be avoided, hindered, or stopped; even, as a last resort, with deadly force.
However, the issue before us is not one of denying that certain activities, or certain people, might become threats to others. The heart of the issue is something else - what is the cause and origin of what we call Evil?
There is no Cosmic Struggle of Good versus Evil. There is no Great Evil to be isolated and located as one's "enemy," the extermination of which will bring world peace to all of us good guys. There are, of course, people who do very bad things, but we delude ourselves to suggest that they constitute the center of Evil in the world.
Fundamentally, there is no "us versus them." There is only the universal quest of each individual - each and every one - struggling toward the Light.
To misconstrue the process; to exclude oneself from the path of enlightenment; to imply that Evil rests only within some external "bad other"; to deny that within one's own self are the same seeds of darkness; to pseudo-piously assert, "I thank thee God that I am not like other men"; is to stunt one's own growth and to trap oneself in psychological dysfunction.
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Carl Jung, BBC interview, 1959 : "We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself ... We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming Evil."
Some, more than others, are farther along the path of the soul's unfoldment and perfection; some are more mature, some less so; some had better formative environments, better parents and teachers; some - the walking-wounded as wise - have already learned from prior bad choices are now "good"; but we all travel the same path, that grand continuum of soul development. And all have their assigned homework that must be turned in before graduation.
All are a mixture of Good and Evil; better stated, all, to various degrees, suffer from faulty spiritual perception.
And, while some may require thousands of years of suffering in the dark realms to obtain a clearer vision, all shall yet aspire and mount to the heights of spiritual perfection.
It is not possible to point to Evil and exclaim, "Look! there it is!"; or, "he or she is the focus of Evil in the world!"
Evil, as a substantive entity, does not exist. There is only distorted spiritual vision and lower levels of consciousness.
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Silver Birch: "Now you should have the faith that all things work wisely and well and that, if you put yourselves in tune with the laws of the Great Spirit, then you must reap the operation of those laws. You can all banish from your minds the thought that anything that is unenlightened - or, as you would say, evil - can ever touch you. You live and move under the protection of the Great Spirit and His laws. If there is no evil in your hearts, then only good can reach you, for only good can dwell where goodness reigns. None but the servants of the Great Spirit come into your presence from my world. You need have no fears. The power which envelops you, the power which supports and seeks to guide you and inspire you, is the power that emanates from the Great spirit of all. That power can sustain you in all your trials and difficulties. That power can change your storms into sunshine, and bring you out of the darkness of despair into the light of knowledge. Your feet are set on pathways of progress. There is no need for fear."
Emanuel Swedenborg was a well-known mystic of the 18th century. In his Conjugial Love (1768), he spoke of his visions of the afterlife. The following was written over 200 years ago:
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"The universals [timeless principles] of hell [the lower realms] are these three loves; the love of dominion grounded in self-love, the love of possessing the goods of others grounded in the love of the world, and adulterous love. The universals of heaven, opposite to these, are the three following loves; the love of dominion grounded in the love of use [charitable service], the love of possessing worldly goods grounded in the love of performing uses [charitable service], therewith, and love truly conjugial."
Notice that the inhabitants of both heaven and hell seek for the same loves; the motivations only, in each case, being different. Evil is merely the Good perverted, turned inside out.
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